Adam Baldwin, the pro-Trump actor know for his roles in Full Metal Jacket, Independence Day, and one of my favorite short-lived space westerns, Firefly, put things in perspective on Wednesday as Congress debated the objections to the counting of Electoral College ballots.
“Think today’s a bad day?” he asked. “Imagine today if Hillary’d won in 2016.”
Think today’s a bad day?
Imagine today if Hillary’d won in 2016.
— Adam Baldwin (@AdamBaldwin) January 6, 2021
As unhappy as I am about the circumstances we are currently in, he has a point. In four years, President Trump managed to clean up much of the mess left behind by Barack Obama and Joe Biden. He fixed the economy that was stagnant for years. Obama told us that high unemployment might be the “new normal” and said manufacturing jobs would never come back to America. “What magic wand do you have?” Obama asked of Trump, who promised to bring those jobs back.
President Trump got us out of the unconstitutional Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate treaty, both of which required Senate ratification. He fought for religious liberty, ended the Obamacare individual mandate, net neutrality, and rolled back Dodd-Frank. On immigration, Trump built hundreds of miles of the border wall and ended Obama’s open borders policies. President Trump got our Israeli embassy moved to Jerusalem, something “experts” predicted would lead to war in the Middle East. Instead, Trump brokered historic peace deals between Israel and neighboring nations. He rebuilt our military and ended Obama’s absurd rules of engagement, and masterminded the defeat of ISIS.
While it’s true that many things accomplished by President Trump can be reversed, one thing Biden can do little about is the judiciary. President Trump made restoring constitutionalism to the judiciary and nominated a historic number of judges, including three Supreme Court justices.
Imagine for one second that Hillary Clinton had won in 2016. Where would our country be?
We survived the Obama years—and he had larger majorities in both Houses of Congress to rubber-stamp his agenda.
I don’t doubt that Biden will try to be as transformative as Obama was, but he is not as well-positioned to do so. That’s thanks to Donald Trump, whose coattails helped us gain seats in the House, and helped secure much-needed victories for Republicans in the U.S. Senate.
Adam Baldwin is right. We should be grateful for President Trump for putting us in a stronger position as a party than we were in 2009 when Obama took office and had control of both the House and Senate. Let’s just hope that the GOP is willing to fight like hell to save our country.
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Matt Margolis is the author of Airborne: How The Liberal Media Weaponized The Coronavirus Against Donald Trump, and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis